The lost harpsichord
"the lost harpsichord" is the the second article written by John Bellairs and the third article overall to appear during the 1958-59 school year for "Escape", the weekly humor column that appeared in the Scholastic, the official student publication of the University of Notre DameNotre Dame Scholastic, Vol. 100, No. 03 -- October 17, 1958. Synopsis * Read "the lost harpsichord" For the first half of the article Bellairs bemoans receiving a bill from the university's Office of Student Accounts for harpsichord lessons, which of course was an error. A conversation between Bellairs and the bumbling bureaucratic follows, the latter going as far to request Bellairs to "demonstrate his inability to play this instrument" to prove the bill was not his. A second topic discusses the new rules for the so-called Sorin Saturday Bacchanalia that cover musical instruments, song choices, costumes, activities, and the rare instance when someone named Charlie Bowen should be allowed on the hallowed Sorin Hall porch. Bellairs finishes the piece with new ideas for sport-like activities that fellow students can participate in, now that Frisbee has become popular. While kick-the-can and pick-up-sticks are innocuous, his Ukrainian hockey proposal seems the least likely to truly win over any student-faculty teams. Commentary Bowen does not recall whether Bellairs actually did receive a misdirected bill for music lessons: "it's quite possible, though it certainly wouldn't have been for harpsichord lessons. His satire on university bureaucracy is effective, in that it targets three characteristics most of us came to be familiar with: clumsiness (sending the bill to the wrong person), needless complication (all those multicolored forms), and the presumption that the student is always wrong.Correspondence with Charles Bowen." Fascinating Regulations Bellairs's "fascinating regulations" refer to the mini-pep rallies staged before home football games. "They attracted some criticism from censorious souls (see my comments on my November 21 column). It's too bad John's regulations weren't put into effect, at least as a one-time experiment. It would have been a refreshing change from the run-of-the-mill hoopla.Correspondence with Alfred Myers." "While 'bacchanalia' would definitely be an exaggeration, the Sorin Hall porch was a popular place to hang out and would particularly come to life on a home football Saturday, when it would generally sport a Dixieland band and a cheering section...and grill on the sidewalk in front of the hall was fired up to sell sausages to the football crowd.Correspondence with Alfred Myers." Myers describes the rest of the article as pure Bellairsian invention, though certain (phony) songs mentioned ("The Ship Caulker's Lament" et al.) are indicative of Bellairs's love of folk songs, particularly of the macabre variety. Sports Dept. Bowen zeroes in on Bellairs's quip that playing kick-the-can on the main quadrangle would result in "ID-seeking policeman" chasing students. "Treading on the grass on the main quadrangle (directly in front of Sorin Hall and facing the Sacred Heart Church and the Main Building) was strictly forbidden. Campus policemen would actually confiscate the ID cards of students caught frolicking there and turn them over to the Dean of Students for appropriate action. This happened to me once, when, on a lovely spring day in my senior year, I yielded to the impulse to toss a Frisbee. There was no other grass in the vicinity, though, in back of Sorin Hall, there was a humongous asphalted lot surrounded by basketball hoops. It was typical of university administrative thinking that this was considered a sufficient and appropriate venue in which students might disport themselves, and all grass-covered areas were, as far as I can recall, verboten, except some fields peripheral to the campus (and a good hike from Sorin) that were used for physical education classes and intramural sports. I was lucky that time I was busted. Frisbee was a novelty at the time, and when I reported as directed to Father Leonard Collins, the Dean of Students, he looked at me and asked somewhat disbelievingly, 'The object of this game is just to throw this thing and catch it? That's all there is to it?' I admitted that this was true, and he sighed, expressing untold depths of world-weary contempt, and handed back my card. I would have been less lucky had I faced his formidable predecessor, Father William McAuliffe, known to the students as 'Black Mac.' His title had been not Dean of Students but (following ancient Notre Dame tradition) Prefect of Discipline. With Collins's succession to the job, the title was changed to something more befitting a 20th century university." Bowen reflected that the administration of Notre Dame in the 1950s still had attitudes more in line with bygone days, as opposed to the experiences relayed by his younger brother during the 1960s: "Students were regarded as mischief-bent ragamuffins who needed to be watched closely and disciplined firmly in order to prepare them to take their place in the world as responsible Catholic laymen - that is, in every respect their attitudes and values should conform as closely as possible to those of the Holy Cross Fathers, many of whom had been in seminary since the age of 13. I'm not really making that up, nor is it (entirely) based on dyspeptic analysis of experience. We were constantly bombarded with pamphlets (such as the weekly Religious Bulletin) and sermons that quite explicitly expressed this point of view. In fact, many students bought into it, and it wasn't uncommon to hear a student say, as if it were something to brag about, that Notre Dame students were subject to a degree of discipline unknown in American higher education outside of the military academies." References lost lost lost lost